Berthoud Living Center

While we did not have many favorable things to say about this nursing home's overall score, it earned a respectable government inspection report this year. It received a decent grade in that area with a B-. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of B-. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below the national average. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

This facility's next best category was short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. Our short-term care grade is generally used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, was this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 58.454105 percent of its residents. This is significantly below the national average. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.